TSMC Quietly Tests Rare-Earth-Free Factory Gear While the VanEck Rare Earth ETF Hovers Just Above Its Annual Floor
Published on 10/23/2026 at 18:31 | Editorial boerse-global.de
The VanEck Rare Earth ETF (ISIN IE0002PG6CA6) closed Thursday at EUR 9.12, down 3.3% on the session, leaving it just 1.8% above the 52-week low of EUR 8.96 it struck on October 22. No single catalyst has been pinned to the drop in current coverage. A broad AP market report on Friday pointed to a selloff in AI stocks and rising oil prices weighing on global bourses, though it drew no line between those forces and rare-earth equities or the fund itself.
That the slide lacks an obvious trigger fits a pattern that has been building for weeks. Roughly three weeks ago, the critical-materials team at Canaccord Genuity flagged that rare-earth shares were running weak even as the underlying metals held firm. The analysts put the softness down to global macroeconomic forces rather than any fundamental trouble inside the sector — a call that sat awkwardly against commodity prices that were proving more resilient than the miners and processors themselves.
A disconnect that runs across the whole sector
The same split has shown up stateside. Rare-earth and uranium producers have reportedly drifted toward their 52-week lows even as physical supply is described as tight. Robust metal prices paired with sagging equities is a puzzle that runs through the entire industry and, so far, has gone unexplained.
Friday's session in China offered a neat illustration of how mood and single-stock news are driving the tape rather than the metals. Shares of rare-earth permanent-magnet makers climbed 2%, lifted by the humanoid-robotics theme and strong profit guidance — China Northern Rare Earth's first three quarters among them. On the very same day, the price of praseodymium-neodymium oxide slipped 1.3%. For a fund that holds a basket of mining and processing names, that kind of cross-current translates into heightened volatility regardless of what the physical market is doing.
Should investors sell immediately? Or is it worth buying VanEck Seltene Erden ETF?
TSMC looks for a way around the bottleneck
A fresh thread came out of Taiwan on Thursday. Reuters reported that chipmaker TSMC has been asking equipment suppliers about factory-automation motors built without rare-earth materials, aiming to blunt the risk of disruption from Chinese export controls. Those talks are at an early stage, according to the agency. For ETF investors this is not an index-level event, but it does signal a structural shift in demand: when a buyer the size of TSMC actively hunts for rare-earth-free alternatives, it points to a long-run diversification strategy across industry, whatever happens to the current export rules.
Beijing's export ledger sends mixed signals
Export policy remains the dominant unknown in the background. China's Commerce Ministry indicated in mid-October, according to a trade publication, that it was willing to ease rare-earth export licensing for the EU. Against that, customs statistics for the first nine months of the year show total exports of all 17 rare-earth elements down 9.6% from the year-earlier period.
There was a more upbeat data point too: China reported that rare-earth exports rose 6.7% year on year in September, with customs authorities attributing the gain to a recovery in overseas demand after a softer summer. No direct link between those figures and the fund's recent price action can be drawn from the reports.
The export controls imposed in October 2025 and suspended since then are due to lapse on their regular schedule in mid-November — a date market watchers have already circled as the next test for supply chains and licensing.
Where that leaves the fund
What investors are left with is an unusual mix: Chinese supply looking stable to growing, producer share prices and the fund still under pressure, and a demand picture being quietly reshaped by substitution efforts at major buyers. Concrete inflows or outflows for the accumulating share class IE0002PG6CA6 cannot currently be substantiated; the available flow data cover only the separately traded US-listed counterpart, REMX, which fell 3.43% on Thursday — driven by the broad tech and AI selloff rather than by weakening rare-earth prices.
The ETF's price sits just 2.4% above its 52-week low, having shed 24% over the past 30 days. That proximity to the annual floor underscores how heavily the recent wave of selling in technology and commodity names has weighed on the fund, even as the fundamental news flow stays mixed. Until corporate announcements or macroeconomic reports offer a coherent explanation for the losses, the market is left to guess — and the coming sessions will show whether the gap between metal prices and share prices closes or hardens.
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